It’s been quite a while since I had to say goodbye to someone.

Not in a break-up sort of way — of course it hasn’t been too long, I think I heard someone say. Nor in a funereal way, not since two summers past. And even that wasn’t so hard, as there’s a sense of finality, of closure, that somehow makes things easier.

My friend left for Atlanta today, to graduate school. Not light years away, not so far that I can’t see her essentially as often as I want to drive over there, not that she doesn’t have family that she’ll be coming home to or friends here that will insist that she come back to Birmingham every so often.

I’m thrown back to the summer camps, though, when you would make friends and become so incredibly close, and so used to their prescence day in and day out. Two or three weeks would pass, and it was time to go home, and there were promises of letters and phone calls and Christmas visits, but none of that is the same. It can’t be.

Everyone that has been around me for the past few months knows, if they were listening, that I have a crush on her. Have, in fact, since I first met her a year or so ago through a mutual acquiantance. But I think I realized over the weekend — as it finally sank in through the packing and the farewell party and the last-minute rushing, as it finally penetrated my head that she was really and truly leaving — my feelings for her are much stronger than I thought, than I was willing to admit to myself, much less anyone else.

I am open to the thought that this is just loneliness, a period of readjustment, to not having her here to make fun of me for thinking Robin Tunney is hot, to watch OZ or bad reality TV shows, to drink ridiculous amounts of alcohol, to talk until all hours of mornings that should never have come. But alone is comfortable to me, really; it allows me to get things done, to work on freelance projects or write or plan films or read. And I don’t think it’s that, really.

But I don’t honestly know anything right now, except that I can so clearly recall the summer of 1986, the last day of the summer program at Duke, saying goodbye to Cynthia, hugging her and never wanting to let go, her parents waiting patiently by the packed car to drive her home, my airport shuttle still twenty minutes away.

Just twelve hours ago, I stood on the driveway behind my friend’s car, the last of her things packed and ready to go, and it took everything I had to let her go.

I’m fourteen years old all over again.

This is not the end. There are many more returns for us both. But right now, cast backward in time, none of that seems to matter.

I miss my friend.

“as long as I can keep my head from spinning back
as long as I can keep my focus on a point that lies ahead
as long as I can move along
as long as nothing too disturbing hits me wrong

then I turn around and I do that all the time
going there feels wrong but the past is so much fun
and all memories are sweeter cause they’re gone
I always want to turn around

there’s a here and now and people to be loved
there are ways to be discovered, there’s a green next to the rough
sometimes I am not afraid to live
and most of all there’s you and what you give

then I turn around and I do that all the time
going there feels wrong but the past is so much fun
and all memories are sweeter cause they’re gone
I always want to turn around

as long as I can keep my head, from spinning back
as long as I can keep my focus on a point that lies ahead”

(Sarah Bettens, Turn Around